The Religious Nature of the City

 From Chad Pecknold at Postliberal Order:

On the hearth of every ancient Greek and Roman home was kept a small, sacred fire. It was the duty of the family to keep it lit night and day. As Fustel de Coulanges argued in his 1864 classic study, “The Ancient City,” on the religious and civil institutions of ancient Greece and Rome, this vesta or “living flame” of the domestic altar was prior to all other devotions to the gods, to such a degree that we might even say that the domestic altar was the common cradle of all natural piety — for the human soul was forged in a family, and the family was itself was a fit home for the rational, relational, and religious nature of man.

The ancients regarded this sacred fire as chaste and pure, as the wellspring of marriage, paternal authority, the happiness of family relations, as well as a fire by which wealth, property and inheritance were blessed. As the family enlarged into other families, expanding associations, and forming a city, it was this same bond of the sacred flame which united all the families, as well as all the principles, rules, laws, institutions, and mores of ancient western civilization. To extend Fustel’s metaphor, we can say that the sacred fire of the hearth should be understood as the city’s most interior altar, integral to both the good of every human person, and the good of every aspect of life together.

Fustel’s point is to show that ancient domestic religion was the constitutive core of the common good of the family, and each family had its own panoply of divinized ancestors and deities. The religion of the sacred fire “caused the family to form a single body, both in this life and the next.” (42) In this way we can understand that the ancient family was primarily a “religious rather than a natural association.” (42) This is not to say that they had no knowledge of the natural law, no knowledge that a family was natural, but that they believed the unity of a family was something more than natural. For example, ancients believed that every member of a family must be initiated into the sacred rites of domestic religion. A natural son would be disowned if he renounced this worship, whereas an adopted son would be counted a real son if he had been initiated into the sacred fire of the family. In this sense, we can see the constitutive hierarchy very clearly.

Again, this is not to say that the family was not natural. It certainly arises from human nature itself, through the union of a man and a woman producing human offspring for which they are responsible. But the natural, temporal conditions for the existence of a family were not sufficient to bind the family together as one. The family was natural, but it was also spiritually tied together by religio, by worship — the common good of the family flowed not from the gene pool but “by the rights of participation in worship.” (42) Yes, they recognized the individual person, but being a person entailed belonging to the family by way of the vesta.

In a similar way, a person also belonged to a City. In his Laws (Bk 5), Plato says that the “kinship” of the city depends on the kinship of the domestic gods. In this sense, the foundation of the city is also not “nature” as such, but worship. As these ancient cities developed, other associative bonds, such as blood, would be admitted -- but nothing was ever as foundational as religion. Even the right of property was an essentially religious idea, for every family required an immovable, stable hearth that belonged to them, that was solely their own. The heart requires soil, a stable foundation upon which to be rested, which can support the sacred fire, and most importantly, unites the family. The walls of a home are raised around religion.

Cicero would recognize the same when he wrote “What is there more holy, what is there more carefully fenced around with every description of religious respect, than the house of each individual citizen? Here is his altar, here is his hearth, here are his household gods; here all his sacred rights, all his religious ceremonies, are preserved.”

The tomb was similarly conceived as something fixed for worship, as the claiming of a space, land, property, which is intelligible for primarily religious reasons. It is thus not only possible to think of religion as the cradle of the family, but of the hearth, the home, the tomb, and yes, the city. Moderns are sometimes puzzled by ancient prohibitions against the sale of land because we fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the ancient city as fundamentally religious. The laws of the hearth were prior to the laws of the city, and those laws were theological through and through. The family was “a little society,” and the fundamental building block of the city. It had a directive principle in the paterfamilias, but it is wrong to think of the family as male-led. The father, like all members of the family, was subordinate to the spiritual power, the sacred fire, the deities of the hearth. The father had rights principally because he had duties, and his chief duty was keeper of the sacred fire along with his wife, who in Roman law was recognized as having equal dignity, if not equal rights, as mater familias precisely because she also was a keeper of the flame, the vesta. Everything about the family was thus conceived as divine to such a degree that the chief virtue of the family was “piety.” The obedience of children to their parents, and the attachment of parents to their children, were regarded as pietas — and so was the love of homeland, or patria. Ulysses longs to see not simply his “country, but “the flame of his hearth-fire,” because the love of one’s homeland is principally religious. As Catholics love the Church, so did the ancients love their homes, and their homeland as bonded together by domestic and civic religion. (Read more.)

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